World Wide Web's Twentieth Birthday Celebrated

Twenty years back, a young UK-born scientist named Tim Berners-Lee approached his senior at CERN to present a roadmap for transferring data online, and the blueprint matured later on to become what is prominently known as 'World Wide Web'.

Since twenty years of its birth, the internet has been an incredible success story, with around 200 million websites as well as more than one trillion unique URLs currently there on the web, and a whopping 1.6 billion people are online.

Addressing 'The Web At 20' launch event for the BBC Two series 'Digital Revolution', Sir Tim Berners-Lee has urged governments and businesses should restrict the monitoring they do on internet users.

The inventor of the internet asserted that soaring supervision of internet browsing could have pernicious effect on users, and that the substantial part of the value of internet rest in lack of restrictions on what users could do with it.

He further said that the internet should be considered as a “blank sheet of paper”. Since governments and companies simply don't monitor what people are writing or drawing on that sheet, so they should stop policing users' online activities.

“The trend over the years is that the internet in the end goes around censorship and openness eventually triumphs. But it is by no means an easy road”, he said.

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Our Comments

Can't believe that the WWW, as we know it is already 20 years old. It achieved things well beyond what it was expected to do, and then some. The rise of mobile connectivity and the sheer number of people now connected to the internet have made of the WWW a vital part of our global culture.